Notes on Marx and AI
Marx's comments on machines have some obvious implications for our AI debate over AI.
This week I remembered why I’ve mostly stayed out of left debates over artificial intelligence: they’re a complete mess. Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer have written a Socialist Case Against Nationalizing AI for Jacobin, and it plays all the usual hits of modern progressive advocacy: fight-capitalism-by-fighting-its-symptoms, crypto-anarchist critiques of wielding the state against capital, a fetish for “movement-building” without explaining what this movement is supposed to do, and a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric painted over all of it.
I tried writing a piece untangling this knot, but it’s just too tedious — so instead, I thought it might be useful to discuss some relevant passages from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”
